BEST OF 2025 The Best Electronic Music of 2025 By Joe Muggs · December 09, 2025
It’s wild that you still see cultural theorists and trend-spotters out there talking about the globalized world leading to either cultural stasis or homogenization in club music. To be clear: There is indeed a mainstream where bottle-service EDM is played to oligarchs, influencers, and their hangers-on as they film one another on the dancefloor. But it only takes the slightest bit of scratching the surface to find thriving creative scenes, packed with both passion for deep tradition as well as wild new variants created by unique personalities. From UK hardcore to Urugua…
BEST OF 2025 The Best Electronic Music of 2025 By Joe Muggs · December 09, 2025
It’s wild that you still see cultural theorists and trend-spotters out there talking about the globalized world leading to either cultural stasis or homogenization in club music. To be clear: There is indeed a mainstream where bottle-service EDM is played to oligarchs, influencers, and their hangers-on as they film one another on the dancefloor. But it only takes the slightest bit of scratching the surface to find thriving creative scenes, packed with both passion for deep tradition as well as wild new variants created by unique personalities. From UK hardcore to Uruguayan future-ancient complexity, from Texan dancehall poetry to utopian Uzbek electro, French ambient house bliss to politicized Colombian arena-techno punk, 2025 has been pulsing with glorious, endlessly refreshing proofs of life. Here are the best of the best.
Sherelle
London, UK
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London, UK
The absolute focus with which Londoner Sherelle has approached everything she does is exhibited gloriously on her debut album. Like her sets, everything here tears along at a solid 160 BPM, all of it stripped down to the bare minimum required to keep the rave moving. But—like her sets—she creates endless variation with the spare elements of Chicago juke and footwork; British rave and jungle; and the subliminal influences of Afro-diasporic sounds from all over the world, injecting endless strange and intense emotions and keeping it gripping from start to finish.
Charles Webster & The South African Connection
London, UK
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00:10 / 00:58
London, UK
The story of the relationship between British deep house producers—particularly those related to the notorious anarchist DiY Sound System in the ‘90s—and the South African scene that eventually birthed the gorgeous, world-changing sound of amapiano is a long, strange, and wonderful one. And it’s encapsulated here inCharles Webster’s collaborations with S.A. artists from across generations. Everything glides along subtly, elegantly, and gorgeously, but it’s also packed with deep reflections on politics, history, and a sense of self and belonging, expressed in both direct and oblique ways. It all makes for a profound experience that reveals more with each listen.
Herbert & Momoko
England, UK
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00:10 / 00:58
England, UK
The impossible productivity and continued freshness of producer, musician, and conceptualist Matthew Herbert never fails to boggle the mind. But even amidst the vast array of musical richness to be found in his discography, this record is special. It’s a joy for old fans, as it overtly harks back to the house rhythms and song structures of his early classics Around the House and Bodily Functions, but it also launches forward from that template, thanks to the writing and vision of singer/drummer Momoko Gill. Gill meshes incredibly well with Herbert’s sound—to the point where a whole new composite personality emerges. It glows with both emotional warmth and flashes of intellect, and it feels like an old friend even on first listen.
Bell Curve
New York, New York
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New York, New York
Texan in New York Bell Curve never stands still, always managing to absorb rhythms and techniques from a grab-bag of soundsystem and electronic styles with every track. Yet somehow she manages to feel firmly rooted even while doing so. This EP boasts many of her familiar reference points—dancehall, dubstep, footwork— all expressed with dazzling production finesse and palpable love. But there’s also a fascinating layer of urbane, punky mischievousness which hints at a line back through electroclash to no wave—and even before.
The Bug vs Ghost Dubs
Brussels, Belgium
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Brussels, Belgium
Nurturing the work of Michael Fiedler, aka Ghost Dubs, on his label Pressure has clearly rubbed off onKevin Martin’s own creative process. On this split album each of them take alternating tracks, but gradually it starts to feel like there’s a joint musical voice emerging. Where Martin’s tracks under his many guises tend to be characterized by an industrial snare drum echoing into infinity, here he and Fiedler both focus on subtler rhythms that join the dots from Berlin dub techno to classic steppers’ reggae. It’s still monumentally heavy, mind you, with bass tones vast even by Pressure standards. But the play of hard and soft, and juggernaut momentum through delicate curlicues of mist, creates a whole new direction in electronic dub.
Tim Reaper
UK
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00:10 / 00:58
UK
While Tim Reaper is rightly revered for his new takes on classic hardcore and jungle, this collection, released almost as an afterthought in September, demonstrates his range. He drops the tempo mostly to techno pace, but within that framework he still brings in a remarkable range of stuff: R&B, grime, Eat-Static-style hippie rave swoops, Leftfield/Underworld-style arena dance, digital dancehall, dub…all of them tweaked, twisted, rendered new and strange. There are 20 tracks here, and none of them sound like the others. The sense of giddy abundance is endlessly compelling.
Josef Tumari
Tashkent, Uzbekistan
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00:10 / 00:58
Tashkent, Uzbekistan
It’s wild that the producer keeping techno’s sense of sci-fi wonder alive should come from Tashkent, Uzbekistan. But maybe being from an area that isn’t saturated with the stuff is actually conducive to his ability to come at it fresh? Whatever the case, Josef Tumari’s productions here consistently channel golden-age Detroit—think Underground Resistance electrofunk, minimalist Robert Hood riffs, the rich chords of Carl Craig at his warmest—but render it fresh and original. It’s not just the Central Asian voices and melodies that subtly weave in and out of the mix, but the sense of total delight in the sounds and rhythms themselves.
Sam Binga
Sam Binga Presents Club Orthodontics
Bristol, UK
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Bristol, UK
Sam Binga, formerly Baobinga, is a club music lifer. He’s ridden out stylistic waves over many years, always absorbing the very best and most immediately functional elements of each sound as it passes. Thus on this collection of tracks, featuring a dazzling array of MCs plus a select few co-producers (among them, Machinedrum, DJ Polo, and Amy Kisnorbo) he delivers straight bangers that touch on breakstep, two-step, amapiano, Jersey club, “Percolator”-style Chicago house, electrohouse and more—but always with a laser focus on what works in the magic moment of the dance. It’s like a party feels alarmingly rowdy when you first walk in, but the minute you get into the middle of things, you can’t resist its joyous, badass energy.
Lila Tirando a Violeta
Uruguay
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00:10 / 00:58
Uruguay
The prolific output of Camila Domínguez, aka Lila Tirando a Violeta, can often be abstract and shadowy;* Dream of Snakes* is her at her most energetic. There’s retro electro, futurist gothic funk, Latin-influenced Detroit techno, rave breakbeats in the mix, but all of it has gone through the looking glass into her dream world, where proportions aren’t what you expect, where soft becomes hard, where gravity and time seem to alter at the spur of the moment, and where you’re faced with more-than-human entities talking in many languages at once. It is, in short, a trip. It’s also some of Domínguez’s very best work to date, its ambition suggesting ever greater things to come.
rRoxymore
Berlin, Germany
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00:10 / 00:58
Berlin, Germany
The third album by Hermione Frank is a smooth and easy listen, its rhythms more regular than either of its predecessors, its pads and arpeggios a bit closer to familiar patterns from deep house, ambient, and New Age. But that doesn’t mean it has any less personality. If anything, the fact that Frank seems more musically comfortable in the moment gives it the air of someone opening up, sharing their emotions, welcoming you in. It’s classic in the sense that you’ll get endless hints of old favorites like Larry Heard, The Orb, Four Tet and so on—but it’s also classic in that every track will stay with you from first listen and you’ll want to replay it again and again.
Black Sites
Berlin, Germany
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00:10 / 00:58
Berlin, Germany
There’s always been a worry that as Hamburg’s Helena Hauff climbed into the techno DJ big leagues she might shed some of the dirty, sweaty, goths-in-the-rave roughness she cultivated in little clubs like her hometown’s Golden Pudel. But on the evidence of this collaboration with Kris “F#X” Jakob—another Hamburger—no such danger exists. The album sounds like it was made with drum machines and synthesizers built out of scrap metal and powered by plugging directly into overhead power lines. It crashes, it bangs, it throbs, it shrieks, it grinds, it is dark basement music in excelsis.
Ela Minus
Brooklyn, New York
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Brooklyn, New York
Colombian producer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Ela Minus started out in teenage hardcore punk bands, and her roots are showing here on her second solo album. Where her debut was big and bold enough to make her an international star, its production and performance were very cool, very restrained, with Minus’s voice mainly an insinuating murmur. DÍA still has plenty of sophistication, but restrained it is not: Here she shouts her fears and feelings to the world in anthemic, distorted choruses, while her music provides fearsome, festival-ready drama. It’s punk in its directness, in its unforgiving self-examination, in its squaring up to existential threats and building a kind of ragged but inspiring hope. It is the glorious sound of a musician fully coming into themselves—and knowing it.